09/09/2008: Six Months of FreeNATS

September marks a six month milestone for FreeNATS. It was released to the world (best as I can tell) on the 2nd of March and the very first VM 1a appliance was uploaded to VMWare on the 12th.

So then, six months... and he/she/it has grown up ever so fast. The very first release was 40kb and now stands at a staggering 250kb.

It seems, well it was, months ago that I had to quickly disable the US download mirror before I put my oh-so-lovely hosting company out of business.

In those heady days you could ping a host, test a port and get a webpage. By the time the VM came out you could get a webpage and record/alert on its size or the time it took to fetch. You can still (mostly) ping a host, test a port and get a webpage but you can now do even more exciting network tests.

User feedback, comments, bugs and suggestions have been great and totally and utterly vindicated the GPL licence distribution channels (giving it away free). Many people have contributed greatly to the project (the thanks page is more than due an update) but at this momentous time I'd like to specifically shame in no particular Ole, James, Terry, Matt, Bigtree, Aday, Wolfgang and Paavo for their invaluable help.

To celebrate the six month milestone we are holding a half-price September sale for new FreeNATS customers purchasing the system for use with 50 nodes or more. This applies to FreeNATS Enterprise, Small Business, Personal Plus, Personal Gold and Lite editions. Stocks are limited so you should contact your dedicated PurplePixie Systems account manager as soon as possible to get these great savings.

Not enough? For existing customers we're offering an amazing 25% of all upgrades to version 1. That's right - upgrade in September and you will get 25% off the list price of your upgrade. Contact your customer account relationship manager today for a quote.